I tried to tell you guys that Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is awesome, but don’t take my word for it, I’m just a guy in a windowless van filled with cats.  Take it from Werner Herzog, he’s, uh… a crazy German guy… who got shot in the belly and laughed about it.  Dang, I may have to rewrite this.

Amped up, antic and crackling with chemical intensity, Nic Cage’s performance moved movie critic Roger Ebert to observe: “Cage is as good as anyone since Klaus Kinski at portraying a man whose head is exploding.”
Cage’s tweaker technique was so realistic, it caused the movie’s director, Werner Herzog — who worked with Kinski on five films — to call into question what the Oscar winner was really putting up his nose.

Was it ants?  Please say it was ants.

“We had prop cocaine. Nicolas would sniff it, and I would ask him to shift positions,” Herzog recently recalled. “From the moment I would ask him to move, he would be acting erratic. All of a sudden, I had the feeling: For God’s sake, has he taken cocaine?”

Cage darkened at the memory of Herzog’s on-set interrogation. “I would be psyching myself up, using my imagination to believe I was really blasted on coke,” Cage said. “I take this little vial of saccharine-type stuff, and I would snort it and try to build that fourth wall around myself, get all agitated so I could believe I was this crazy cop who was high. And Werner would say to me, ‘Nicolas, what is in that vial?’ I’d be like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ ” [LATimes]

You have to admit, it takes a solid performance to make a guy who started a film school with a class in lockpicking stop and say, “Release za pigs!  Wait… Dude, are you high?”  We also gave Nic Cage kind of a hard time about wasting his money on stuff like cobra anti-venom, but seeing as how he was about to do a movie with Werner Herzog, now it just seems like a reasonable precaution.